I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

..And I don’t need to say another damned word, huh? The title has directly downloaded itself via your optic nerves into your hypothalamus; right now the room is almost painfully bright and there’s a taste of bananas and electricity in the back of your mouth. Light sabers. Kurosawa. Slow-motion combat scenes. You did not know that such a thing might be allowed to exist.

This is what it is like to be pandered to, my Star Wars droogies. This is how it feels to have impersonal forces casually shuck your carapace so that they may then feast upon your succulent money.

While nothing can top last year’s mega-huge reveal that Disney was buying LucasFilm with an eye toward making a brand-new trilogy, today’s announcement that Zack Snyder will direct a standalone Star Wars film separate from that new trilogy is still pretty massive.

Vulture broke the news this afternoon, stating that Snyder – who took himself out of the running for directing the newly-announced Episode VII – will instead develop a new Star Wars project for the company. The new feature will be inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Seven Samurai, and will apparently run parallel to events in the new trilogy.

Also: apparently we didn’t need to get stuff like this over George Lucas’ dead body. Who knew? (more…)

“…going after the Jedi” thing. If for no other reason than that all the posts on the subject go back to one story that was aggregated over several different websites, and which appears to be based on one website which apparently is complaining that people are writing ‘Jedi’ on British census documents when they should be writing ‘atheist.’

Which is a shame, really. Watching Richard Dawkins humiliate himself completely by having to debate some guy in a Norris Robe would have made my day.

Well… OK, it’d be called ‘Redneck Jedi’ – which I don’t want to call it, because people would be using ‘redneck’ as a pejorative, and that’s not cool. But by GOD I would happily play a lightsaber video game that had a soundtrack like this:

The problem would be in finding somebody like Pat McManus to write the storyline. Although… you could actually get Pat McManus to write the storyline, then have somebody tart it up with the obsessive attention to detail that is a hallmark of the Star Wars universe.

But aside from what we see onscreen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas’ willingness to compromise the integrity of his Trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: “Ewok” is a household word, despite the fact that it’s never once spoken in the film.

Of course, the advice that I got right afterward from a third party – which was to just get over the entire Lucas betrayed fanboy thing – was probably very sensible. At least, I bristled at it, which is usually diagnostic.